1. Field of the Invention
The present invention deals with methods which may be used for building and transmitting packets of information over networks, as well as a method which may be used to process information that is received from a sending device on a network, which enables any errors in the received data caused by noise in the network to be corrected. Thus, any networking apparatus utilizing my method will be provided with improved means for building data packets, improved means for transmitting data, and improved means for error correction of data.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Up until the present invention, the emphasis in the networking art has been to find methods, and therefore apparatus, which have higher and higher efficiencies of transmitting data to effectively increase the networking speed. One such method with which I am familiar simply appends an address bit onto 128 bits of information, to form a common data packet, and once a minimal handshaking architecture is established between the sending and receiving device, proceeds to transmit with an efficiency approaching an ideal one hundred (100%) percent, i.e., 128/129 bits of data are usable, for a theoretical efficiency of ninety-nine (99%) percent.
However, this efficiency is never achieved, except under ideal conditions, which in themselves almost never exist, because if even one bit of data is destroyed by noise, the system using this method has no alternative except to keep on trying to retransmit all 128 bytes in the packet until they are received error-free. There are no means for error correction in the system to reconstruct bytes of information, and no way to retransmit only those bytes of information which could not be reconstructed.
After analyzing the problems with the aforementioned methods of data transmission, I have concluded that much higher actual efficiencies can be realized by providing a means for error correction in the data when information is being processed for transmission, said means for error correction then being useable by the receiving apparatus to reconstruct data blocks which may have been destroyed by noise on the system. However, in order not to reduce the efficiency of the system in any greater degree than is necessary, under conditions where very little noise would be expected on the system, I will begin my transmission method by sending blocks of data with nothing other than the address code appended thereto (Type 1 packet), but I will provide for a threshold limit should noise appear, such that after a given number of attempts to retransmit a packet of information, the apparatus using my method will automatically start appending the information needed for error correction into the data packets to form Type 2 data packets.